Development and psychometric evaluation of a behavioral marker system for circulating nurse's non-technical skills

• Published in: Perioperative care and operating room management 2021-06, Vol.23, p.100167, Article 100167
• Main Authors: Kalantari, Reza, Zamanian, Zahra, Hasanshahi, Mehdi, Jamali, Jamshid, Faghihi, Ali Akbar, Niakan, Hadi, Abbasi, Javad
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Circulating nurses; Non-technical skills; Operating room; Surgery; Tool development
• ISSN: 2405-6030; 2405-6030
• DOI: 10.1016/j.pcorm.2021.100167

•The circulating nurses need to deploy non-technical skills to do safe and efficiently.•An observational tool is developed to evaluate circulating nurse's non-technical skills.•The tool consists of five domains, including task management, teamwork, situational awareness, communication, and leadership•The validity and reliability of the designed tool is confirmed. Non-technical skills are essential to the performance of circulating nurses. Assessment of these skills is important because using them can improve patient safety. This study aimed to develop a behavioral marker system to assess circulating nurse's non-technical skills. In the first step, the item pool was developed based on a literature review, semi-structured interviews, and task analysis. Then the validity of the tool was evaluated using face, content, and construct validity methods. The reliability was checked using internal homogeneity, consistency, and inter-rater agreement methods. The face validity was confirmed by subject matter experts. The scale level content validity index was at an acceptable level (S-CVI=0. 93). Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis methods confirmed the construct validity. The final version of the tool contained 43 items. All fit indices were at an acceptable level. Cronbach's alpha coefficient of the tool was 0.86. The intra-class correlation for intra-rater and inter-rater reliability were 0.92 and 0.94, respectively. The circulating practitioner list of non-technical skills is a valid and reliable tool. The tool can be used to assess the quality of services provided by circulating nurses.